Borderlands 2 continues to be a bit baffling. Throwing a GTX 680 at it as a PPU does not yield crazy results – but a GTX 650 does surprisingly well. My hypothesis? Clocks matter. The GTX 650 SC from EVGA that I used is clocked at 1202 MHz whereas the GTX 680 was at it’s default clock of 1006 MHz. Even with that said – then why doesn’t the 650 Ti beat the GTX 680 since it is clocked at 1071 MHz? The only data that makes sense from these tests are the results from Fluidmark. The cards improve in a linear fashion based on how they are positioned by NVIDIA. Interesting results…but overall I’m sticking with the 650 Ti in my system – as it is the best all-around performer: value, efficiency, and performance.

As always, the full logs from my benchmarks are available to download by clicking here.

Although the 650 Ti had the lesser of the Average FPS gains, it seemed to have the highest MIN (and MAX) FPS gain, which to me seems very important. My biggest issue with BL2 is that the FPS drops a lot, and I would expect the 650 Ti then to help with the drops.

I got one of the single slot gt640 evga, put that in my 3way sli gtx470 rig on e760 classified, i7 six core, dedicated for physx, and best i get are 2-3 fps increase in Borderlands 2, mafia 2, batman arkham city, metro 2033, etc… what a waste of money. I am going to contact evga to see why they advertise the classified as 3 sli + physx… by the way, borderlands 2 still has huge microstutter with the latest drivers no matter what configuration I use, 3sli, physx dedicated or not, physx on 3sli, etc…

not mentioning that after each reboot one of my gtx470 is gone from device manager and unless reseated it will never show up, what a joke….
antec 1200 w psu, in case anyone wonders, 25 yrs experience in building custom pcs… evga has a trouble ticket opened, they want me to upgrade to 6 series cards, yeah right: my 3way 470sli still beats the shit out of their new 680… if they will swap under lifetime warranty my 3×470 with 2×680 i’ll do it.

a short follow up: I went and got 2 gtx 660ti evga sc, put them in sli, ran few benches, so far they surpass my 3×470 sli by 15 to 25 % speed; now i added one of my 470 as dedicated for physx and the whole story changed dramatically, I got on physx games and benchmarks 10 to 20% increase in performance. I am selling my other 2x470s now.

I know i’m a bit late in asking but I think you could help me out.
Basically I’m planning to go quad crossfire + physx.

I tested out a gt240 vs gt640 and I experienced loss in FPS and performance.

So basically, I don’t have a more powerful card than my GT640. perhaps you could advise if the GT 640 won’t bottleneck 4x hd7950? and if it does what do you recommend? 650ti? 760? 580?
basically i’m experiencing throttling in fluidmark -500mhz + and I read that the issue is all over the 600 series cards… this is the reason why me asking 500 series and 700 series cards… also i’m gonna put it at 1x pcie 2.0. ( with cable extender ) and will the pci 128 / 256 384 bit pcie bus play a role? heard that gpu mem is not affecting fps…

Hey man – yeah those are junk cards for PhysX unless you’re talking like maybe a single GPU. You definitely need a 650 Ti or higher for your setup. I’d buy something like that on Amazon (good return policy) and test it. Don’t worry about VRAM – just get a fast card with GDDR5. Doesn’t matter if 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, etc. for PhysX purposes. With 4 cards like yours, it may get crazy in there for dedicated PhysX…but I looked at dedicated 580 and 680 cards and it was not any better than a 650 Ti so that’s where I’d start for bang/buck!

hey first, I’m in the philippines. No returns even at out local stores. yeah great customer service here!

why ddr5? and i’m concerned about the the ribbon ( pcie extender 1x will give problems due to low pcie bandwidth.

also since you have a quad.. perhaps if its not too much, can you make an article on your test again for a quad setup ? – basically finding out what is the bottle neck for the physix card.

and i’m trying to avoid 600 series due to the apparent throttling. ( did you exp it w/ you gt640? how about the Ti? )

not looking for bang for the buck but somewhere where in that the dedicated physx card is not throttling and is not bottle-necking the 4 cards.

I was thinking a gtx 760 but its a bit expensive. How about the heat? – planning to WC.

basically to give you an idea I have msi xpower 2 with 3930k and 64gb ram ( VMs ans ramdisk ) so if i do a quad i have no ther way to mount card other than a pcie extender but I’m left with 4 pcie 2.0 1x on the boards.

I wish I could help you, man. I’ve moved onto different setups now, heh. I’m running tri-SLI TITANS and 290X’s in CrossFire at the moment. Honestly, I say scrap your plan, dude. PhysX is just not all that and if you really want to play with it, go 650 Ti. Anything else will be too much $$$. I only say get GDDR5 because the DDR3 ones are so bunk…re-sale will be crap. 650 Ti is actually a hot little card for 1080p gaming so if you buy one for around $150 (or whatever they go for) it will serve other purposes, as well.

hey I’m running it with 3x 1920×1200 on portrait. still 650ti? hey I know its not all that but i usually upgrade every 6 yrs or more. this rig might last me 7-8! thus me spending for a physx.

I’m not thinking of resale.

I’m concerned in gtx 760 vs a gtx 660ti ( almost same price ) but shaders / clock are different so i’m not sure what is really needed for physx.
I could got 650ti but just concerned about bottle necks as i can’t return card and get another one. which means i need to buy aother one ( more money ).

Well, if you are running 4×7970 and then adding that dedicated PhysX GPU – you may be running into PCIe bandwidth issues. I say scrap it. And why keep a rig for more than 2-3 years? Those cards will be hot and loud and 2 cards will out perform it.